Montesquieu

Power must be arranged to check power.

In their words

“Power should be a check to power.”

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that liberty survives only where legislative, executive and judicial authority rest in different hands, and that moderate government depends on intermediate bodies standing between ruler and subject. He treated despotism as a machine that runs on fear and can be resisted only by structure, never by the virtue of the man in charge. The American constitution is his design.